Hey, I have a few questions about the lottery system that will help me clarify some doubts:

In the website, its stated:

“Publisher Mining: 1440 coins / day Lottery system (10 tickets for a completed hash (standard difficulty not 1 per block), 5 tickets for a unique user and 1 ticket for a repeat hit from an existing visitor.”

1) how are these coins distributed during the day? Are they granted at each block confirmation?

2) what did you mean by “standard difficulty, not 1 per block”

3) please elaborate: how many “tickets” do I get if I have 1 visitor who finds 1 hash for a block and 2 hashes for an second block?

4) before the updates this weekend I was generating more coins than after the update. What changed in the algorithm?

4b) maybe self-mining being activated again is interfering with the lottery results?

1. At the end of the block all hashes are collected and the lottery runs. Transaction data for the lottery rewards are written to the next block.

2. The algorithm has actually changed so it’s more weighted towards unique users in the publisher side and hashes found on the self-mining side. I’ll update the site.

3. We setup some fraud controls to limit the entries per block per ip address and per user. This was because some malicious users were trying to abuse the system and placing limits makes it fairer for everyone.

4. Discussed above
4b. The publisher mining is separate to the self-mining so there shouldn’t be any interference.

As you can see here, some users got paid for mining 0.005 and some users got 0.01.1) Why is that happening? What makes them earn 0.01 instead of 0.005?

Also, some users can have many rewards (i.e 15217 has 11 rewards).
I assume this is caused by the lottery results, granting that user more rewards, correct?
In that case, and taking part of your previous answer:

3. We setup some fraud controls to limit the entries per block per ip address and per user. This was because some malicious users were trying to abuse the system and placing limits makes it fairer for everyone.

2) Is there limit for self-mining (hashes found) per block in place or can a user send 1,000 hashes per block and it will grant him 1,000 tickets? (I know it’s not possible with the current difficulty to send 1k, but I want to understand the validations in place.

So the current lottery system runs separate reward structures for the publishers and self-miners. Publishers are distributed 1440 coins per day and self-miners 720 coins per day. The publishing side is 50 payments per 30 second block at 0.01JSE and the self-mining is 50 payments at 0.005JSE. This is why the payments are different. This was actually changed a few days ago from 100 payments at 0.005JSE for the publishers.

The self-mining system is restricted to one lottery ticket per user but publishers can earn more than one lottery ticket per user as long as they meet other criteria. i.e. duplicate visitor IP addresses aren’t rewarded for example. This is why it’s possible for publishers with large volumes to earn multiple mining rewards per block. At some point we may introduce the one ticket per publisher account per block to the system but at the moment we feel this would hurt the large publishers too much and wouldn’t provide a fair distribution. There are benefits and drawbacks to every change we make to the lottery system and if one person benefits another person suffers. Long-term we aim to provide the fairest possible distribution of the tokens to the miners. If you have any further feedback, criticisms or suggestions we would appreciate your input.

There are currently between 500-1000 users self-mining at any one time. Busiest time of day tends to be between 3pm GMT and 9pm GMT.

It’s one ticket per block. We do this to prevent anyone taking advantage of the system using custom hardware such as ASIC devices. By imposing the one ticket per block for self-miners it means that the rewards are more evenly distributed and there is no advantage to someone running a server farm over someone at home with a laptop.